JAN BUCKI

On 12 May 1947, the District Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes in Radom, Branch Office in Busko-Zdrój, in the person of Judge and acting notary Jan Hetnarski, a member of the Commission, with the participation of reporter Marian Budziński, interviewed the person specified below as a witness. Having advised the witness of the criminal liability for making false declarations, of the provisions of Article 107 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, and of the significance of the oath, the Judge took an oath therefrom pursuant to the provisions of Articles 111–113 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, following which the witness testified as follows:


Name and surname Jan Bucki
Age 64 years old
Parents’ names Michał and Katarzyna, née Rasała
Place of residence village and commune of Szaniec, district of Stopnica
Occupation farmer
Religion Roman Catholic
Criminal record none

From 1937 until the autumn of 1943, I was the village administrator of Szaniec, and while I was performing this function during the German occupation, one German called Wagner, the head of the Food and Agriculture Department at the District Authority’s Office in Busko- Zdrój, formulated a demand for the commune of Szaniec which in turn requisitioned quotas of grain, potato, livestock and milk from each community in a given commune.

If I remember correctly, the following amount of food was requisitioned from the community of Szaniec: 20 quintals of grain in the first year (i.e. 1939), 500 quintals in 1940, and 1,800 quintals of grain in 1941, about 2,300 quintals of potatoes, cattle and pigs in quantities which I don’t remember, 360 liters of milk from one cow and 500 liters from each subsequent cow. In 1942 food requisitions in the community of Szaniec were the same as in 1941.

In the autumn of 1941, six people from my community were arrested for failure to fill the grain and milk quotas. Three of them were sent to the camp in Słupia near Pacanów as punishment for the milk quota, while the other three were sent to Pińczów prison as punishment for the grain quota. They returned home after their families filled the quotas.

At the beginning of autumn of 1942, the Germans, that is, the Sonderdienst [special service] from Busko, came to the village of Szaniec with a gendarme from Chmielnik bringing a list of people who were to be sent to perform forced labor in Germany. They picked five people from among those whom they had detained in order to send them to Germany to work, and released the rest.

At the end of autumn of 1942, one Erlich, a local agronomist from the governor’s office in Busko, came to the village of Szaniec, accompanied by the Sonderdienst, in order to collect the rest of the potato quotas. I witnessed how said Erlich beat some farmers with a whip for no reason. He also beat three women – one of them had recently given birth. Erlich encountered this woman in an apartment while she was washing nappies for her baby. Her arms were exposed and blood was gushing out of her hands as she was beaten with a whip. Out of all these farmers, one Piotr Prędki was subjected to the most severe beating, for he fainted and collapsed onto the ground while Erlich was beating him with a whip and a Sonderdienst was hitting him with a rifle butt.

In addition, I know that around autumn of 1943, while said Erlich was inspecting the fields in a Szaniec farm on horseback, in some canola he stumbled upon a Jewish family consisting of six people. He shot the father and the mother together with two of their children, and sent the remaining two people – a mother with her small son – to Busko by cart, to leave them at the disposal of the gendarmes. The Jewish family who got murdered were from the village of Szaniec, and this is where they were residing at the time. I knew this family well. The father was called Moszek Goldszlag. I was some 400 meters away while they were being murdered.

I can also say that after the harvest of 1944, the Gestapo men from Busko came to the village of Szaniec and took away my 36-year-old son-in-law Roman Janik, and one Bolesław Górka, 34 years old, under the suspicion of membership in a clandestine organization. A week later both arrestees were shot in the Wełecz forest – allegedly by the Gestapo driver from Busko called Hans. Several days after the execution, my daughter and her friends found a grave in the Wełecz forest containing the corpses of my son-in-law, Górka, and one Majcher from the village of Chrabków, Pińczów commune. On the following day, one Tytus Ciepliński from Szaniec transported the corpses from the Wełecz forest to the parish cemetery in Szaniec, where they were put in coffins and buried in one grave.

I have nothing more to add.